When I’m starting a project this big, I usually start by thinking of concepts and worrying a lot. My comics are tiny and my original art pages are tiny (no more than 8″ wide), so these BIG (18″x24″) poster designs are a pretty daunting task for me. So I’m not messing around about the fret and anguish that come along with conceptualizing a project such as this.

Once I work my way through the mire of apprehension, I start making thumbnails (tiny, quick, drawings) of a few concepts. Here’s the one I chose. I’ve included my hand for size reference. I also used pre-printed thumbnails I created in Adobe Illustrator that are exactly proportional in size to the 18″x24″ poster, complete with a roughed-in title. (By the way, every image in this series will enlarge if you click it.)

I scanned my favorite thumbnail, resized it in Adobe Photoshop to poster proportions (18″x24″) and printed it out. I do not have a large format printer, so I simply printed out about half-a-dozen separate pieces and taped them together. (Where there’s a will, there’s a way.) I used this large-scale print-out to help me transfer my basic design to the 18″x24″ piece of bristol (thick drawing paper). Since I don’t have a lightbox big enough to transfer (trace) an image this large, I just use a sliding glass door in my house. That’s the garage in the background. The reason I transfer my thumbnail directly onto the large-scale drawing surface is because I am not very good at maintaining decent character proportions when I start drawing larger. So this is my work-around.

Once I transfer my thumbnails onto the bristol with blue pencil, it looks something like this. Pardon the poor quality of this photo, but it was really difficult to photograph non-photo blue pencil. 🙂

The large construction drawing you saw above gives me the freedom to focus on the details of the drawing. Here’s a good portion of the illustration fully penciled.

Once I finish with the pencils, the inking comes next. I use a Black Faber Castell PITT Brush Pen for the figures and a Prismacolor 005 for most of the mono-width lines on the inanimate objects. There are tons of brush pens out there, but I like the firmness and flexibility of the PITT Brush Pen. The Prismacolor mono-width pen is the best thin-pen I’ve found. It is very tiny, which helps for inking those small details, yet surprisingly strong. I’ve used other 005 width pens whose tip would start to mushroom-out from my meaty grip. Anyhow, here’s the almost-fully-inked version.

As I grew weary of drawing, I started experimenting with my new camera.

It seems to do alright with the macro shots.

Back to work! Now it is time to SCAN this big boy. It was so large I had to scan it in multiple sections and piece them together in Photoshop. Here is the final scan.

You’ll notice that scan does not have the lettering in the bottom portion. I lettered the bottom section digitally. I had a font made of my serifed hand-lettering. Serifs can be pretty time-consuming to hand-write, so a while back I went to www.fontifier.com and paid them 9 bucks to fontify my serifed font. If anyone knows of a cheaper (or free-er) fontify-ing service, please let me know in the comments section. Just a quick aside; I do not digitally letter any of my comics pages, as I really like the organic look achieved from hand-lettering, but there are occasions where I will digitally letter. This is one of them.

Now that the line art is complete, I begin the digital coloring process by “flatting” the artwork. This is the term used for laying in your flat colors under the line art. At this stage I am thinking about an overall color scheme, but my focus is more on mapping out the areas of color accurately. Once the areas of color are delineated it is easy to select and alter a color, so my greater focus is on accuracy at this point, not color choice.

Once the piece is flatted, then I render it. I think about lighting sources and shadows, surface texture and color theory. I try to give the piece a unifying color scheme, yet still allow the main subject(s) to be the focus. Here’s the final piece.

Thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this process post and maybe I’ll see you at the MSU Comics Forum. We’ll be giving away a limited amount of these 18″x24″ posters at the event. Just come by my table on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 and I’ll hand you one (assuming there are still some remaining).